Chapter 225: Baby Bars

For creative individuals, their ideas were usually a hit or a miss. In Zerg's case, he had Rino to rely on to always make them a hit.

Ubel created several tiny bar moulds that Rino found too good to dispose of after their uses. He could think of ways to make these mini bars work. Currently, nobody used money for anything even when the population is booming. Rino only thought about making something reliable as a valuable currency to reward his workers with that could be exchanged for other benefits such as an entry fee for the hot spring baths or even collectable items. Rino only feared that the moment these coins were made, they would be spent on limited but highly sought after items such as taro beer. The economy would crash before it began, and Rino didn't want that.

Leaving it as an idea for the future, Rino concentrated on his large-scaled version of the magical furnace. The most important part was mana imbued glass for the mixing chamber where all the chemical magic happens. Rino spent the time while waiting for his new moulds and mana imbued glass to come preparing the room with all the accident-proof spells he needed.

The location he chose to build this magical furnace was inside the abandoned dwarven mine. Nobody was allowed near the new forge room while Rino constructed it with the help of Kamiya's clan.

A huge underground cavern was dug, and Rino extended the mana web array into the new room as the killer rabbit monsters solidified the ground and strengthened the walls. Rino enlisted the help of a few senior Genesis fairies to assist with his magic setup. The ores he requested were rolled in using carts on wheels because the rails did not reach his new room. Rino left that task to the trolls as he installed the other runes he needed for the magical furnace.

From above, Phil watched as Rino multitasked between setting up his new furnace room and running several experiments to find the optimum gravity to bring the raw elements into the huge spatial chamber.

It took Rino several tries to understand the best gravitational manipulation intensity for the most reactivity between his charcoal and marble stone and the reaction between charcoal and extracted iron ore from the raw mixture. Rino also found a use for Ubel's original bar casts thanks to Zerg, who thought that slag could be made into bricks instead of useless rocks. Unlike clay and terracotta, these bricks might not be very uniform in material, but they were easy construction materials to acquire for the expanding town.

In half a day, the materials were ready, and Rino even evacuated the site to test it for advanced explosion magic resistance. The barrier did its job even if the same could not be said about the items on the inside of the new forge room. Seeing how the ore stash left behind in the room combusted into nothing after Rino's test spell, the lich made a rule and limited all entry into this magical forge to only shadow summons. The other townsfolk who were not contracted with him as an 'immortal' summon were barred from entering. The genesis fairies who helped Rino set this up were also banned after the rule was implemented for safety reasons.

"If anything relating to magic requires tuning, inform the goblin shaman to resolve it if I'm indisposed," Rino instructed the newly appointed earth gnome who was made to oversee the magical furnace from the outside.

Trolls and shadow spectres were the main workers in the magic furnace room. Acht reviewed the tannery's manpower and decided that he could spare two shadow spectres to work in the furnace room on rotation if they did not have any sky palanquin orders.

Rino decided that the shadow spectres were rather short-handed and wondered if there was a way he could recruit more. He had no idea why the bandits turned into shadow spectres while the villagers who died turned into lesser undead like skeletons and lesser ghouls upon evolution. There was still so much about dark magic he did not understand. Kragami's summons turned into zombies, and not even the old magician knew why.

Once the huge magical furnace and custom ordered parts were installed, Rino did his first test with a wagon full of hematite, crushed charcoal and ground marble stone. He did not want to overburden his new spatial chamber with too many things, so Rino told the trolls to add them into the funnel chute on the second floor's loading platform, one shovel at a time while he watched from the control room.

The new furnace room's structure was slightly different as Rino designed several partitioned rooms for safety purposes. In short, the huge cavern was divided into three, with the bottom as a material collection and heat control room. The middle level that Rino was currently on was a small viewing platform with a magic control station to control the heat intensity, airflow and gravitational effects in the spatial chamber. The top room was for ore storage and for miners to add materials into the chute to bring new ores, coke and limestone into the main spatial chamber for smelting.

Watching shovel after shovel of raw materials getting thrown into the large smelting pot, Rino ordered the trolls in the lower level to change out the casts to the regular bar casts for the slag. His operation had just begun, but Rino was already starting to see the three materials reacting as they were blasted in circles by his air pipe at the bottom of the spatial chamber.

Reducing the gravity in the spatial chamber, Rino watched the limestone and coke reacting with raw iron. While the smaller bits of solids flew in the vicious air current caused by Rino's air runes, the molten liquid of slag started to splatter at the side of the spatial chamber and slid downwards to the bottom of the glass prison, forming a small puddle.

The heat was just nice, and Rino waited to see if more would happen. He called for the trolls on the upper floor to stop pouring raw iron ores. Instead, they were told to add more charcoal and marble stone to the furnace.

Not one to question their intelligent lord, the trolls did as they were told. As more coke and limestone were loaded, the trolls in the collection chamber emptied out molten slag into the bar casts to reduce the volume inside the spatial chamber.

Rino did the math previously. As a proud father of alchemy, he knew that he needed at least three shovelfuls of raw iron ore to form one baby bar. A baby bar was roughly a fifth of a regular bar, but it was heavy enough to create useful items for household use. It might not be enough to make any weapons, tools or armour, but things like kitchen knives and hooks could be smithed from those smaller bars. The gods should not discount their utility, and if they accepted baby bars as a type of bar, Rino need not spend GF credits to buy more day-offs for this daily quest.

The time to process the raw ore into a pig iron baby bar was about two hours under gravitational manipulation. As iron and steel are born from the same ore, Rino calculated that he should use about seven to eight shovelfuls of raw ore accompanied by a heck ton of coke and limestone for extraction and even more charcoal for the refinement.

According to the tutorial, he needed coke and limestone to remove big impurities within the raw ores to extract iron from them. The solid enough product at the end of the first blasting session was known as pig iron, a very impure form of iron consisting of up to four percent of coal inside it. Pig iron was very brittle and rusted very quickly. It was what he saw with Zerg at the village. After changing locations to test the smelting process, the iron they obtained rusted just as quickly in the cave as it did near the sea.

After refining the pig iron, Rino found the extracted metal to be a little tougher for smithing. After the first round of refining, the birth of iron came at two percent of carbon content within the metal. Just a reduction of two percent in carbon content could transform brittle pig iron into stronger cast iron. It wasn't very useful for now, but Rino only needed to make one baby bar of cast iron to fulfil the daily quest requirement. At the same time, further refining of that iron mixture would give birth to steel. Steel was basically iron with a very low percentage of carbon mixture in it. Anything less than one percent of carbon mixed into the molten iron would be considered steel.

In terms of toughness and useability, steel was better than cast iron and pig iron because it did not rust easily and was much stronger. It also took a higher temperature to be melted down, making them great for armour and important tools.

Rino looked at the remaining little bit of solid in his spatial chamber as the slag finally lessened. At this point, that lump should be pig iron. Feeling confident enough to not check on it, Rino told the trolls to toss more charcoal in on the upper floor. He was going to refine iron and steel at the same time.

"Crank the heat intensity," Rino instructed the collection workers on the floor below as he adjusted the gravitational magic from the control room. 

There was a limit to how hot the fire magic could go before he started melting the rocks in the cave. Rino moved to the second phase and decreased the gravity inside his furnace chamber. It did not take long before he started to see new things happening as the pig iron turned to a mixture of slag before showing signs of melting.

Eagerly, Rino instructed the trolls to stop tossing charcoal while the helpers emptied the slag. He kept the temperature inside the chamber constant to prevent the iron from melting completely while keeping the slag molten enough to be drained.

Then, he cranked the heat up to watch that red hot stone turn into a molten puddle of grey. This was the iron he needed and wanted.

Blowing air through it for a while longer, Rino watched for the signs that it was ready to be poured out as cast iron. According to the tutorial, having a steady supply of air going through the molten iron would help to remove the excess carbon stuck in it. Rino had no idea how that worked, but he had few options.

Placing his faith with the improved tutorial given by the system, Rino did as told and watched for the signs.